Cardinal Edmund Szoka

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Governor of Vatican City who got its accounts back into black and insisted on transparency

Cardinal Edmund Szoka was a one-time governor of Vatican City whose eagle eye for financial sloppiness reversed, in dramatic fashion, the declining bank balance of the Holy See.

On Szoka’s watch, for the first time in 23 years, Vatican accounts went from the red into the black, and Szoka, a Polish-American, boldly challenged tales of the Vatican’s fabled wealth, saying: “The Holy See ran a deficit from 1970 until 1993. It operates on a very thin budget. There are no perks. No one’s getting big bonuses.”

Instead, he insisted on transparency, bringing — via a grant from America — the first computers